Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you."
"I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs... and good ones."
"I believe the time will come when the whole definition of pop music will change. It will get to the point where a song will not be a good song until it has a high level of creativity in writing and performance. In other words, in order to be popular, songs will have to meet these high standards."
"So if you look at the writings of intellectuals, there are two kinds. One said, l"Look, if we fought harder we could have won.But the others, who were way at the left, people like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, way out in left stream, his view in 1975 was the Vietnam war began with blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969, it was clear that it was a disaster, that was too costly to us."
"A lot of the people involved in the media are very serious, honest people, and they will tell you, and I think they are right, that they are not being forced to write anything."
"The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life."
"People write music, and the music is out there for people to interpret it how they want to."
"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work - just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."
"I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write."
"I'm writing all the time. And as the songs begin to coalesce, I'm not doing anything else but writing. I wish I were one of those people who wrote songs quickly. But I'm not. So it takes me a great deal of time to find out what the song is."
"If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple."
"When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it."
"If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things."
"Men must speak English who can write Sanskrit; they must speak a modern language who write, perchance, an ancient and universal one."
"Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were, probably, the best men in their generation, and they deserve that their biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but hear the "glad tidings" of which they tell, and which, perchance, they heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this."
"I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs."
"I like reading, writing, hiking, camping, free running, surfing, rock climbing, long boarding, and so much more."
"I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking."
"When something irritates me, I don't go home and write; I just don't do that."
"Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications."
